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An anonymous reader writes "`This week researchers announced that a storm is coming — the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one," she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.`

Not true at all! This is just proof that mans impact on the environment extends throughout the solar system. It wasn't enough for us to mess up our own planet, now we have caused solar warming as well!

Not true at all! This is just proof that mans impact on the environment extends throughout the solar system. It wasn't enough for us to mess up our own planet, now we have caused solar warming as well!

"Man's impact"? Um, I think you mean "George W. Bush's impact". If he'd just sign Kyoto, the sun would instantly return to normal.

What makes this joke especially funny is that, despite the fervent belief of most of the crazy elements on the left, George W, Bush CAN'T sign the Kyoto Treaty even if he wanted to. So their carping for him to sign only reveals their ignorance.

Huh? What can I possibly mean? Am I trolling? Nope. Shrubbie can't sign Kyoto because there is already a signature on it for the US. President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton has already signed the Kyoto Treat

Everything is driven by money. Always follow the money trail. Why do you think there are people who whine about embryonic stem cell research even though only adult stem cells have yielded viable results? Because the guys getting results have private investors, and the guys not getting results run to the public to make everyone else pay them with federal funds--aka, your taxes.

You don't consider the cultivation of livestock a human activity? Seriously?Maybe he's part of the IPCC which also doesn't consider it to be so.

In a sense they are right. Cow gas and cow belches are not human activity. Yes mankind has increased the numbers of them.

And the key difference is political impetus and control. Seriously, bovine contribution to GW is approximately 11% greater than human industrial outputs. But you won't see the AGW disasterbators saying we need to reduce the number of cows, or put

1.) Apparently, the Earth magnetic field has decreased by 10% in the last 150 years (source: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/earth_magnet [space.com] ic_031212.html). I'm an electrical engineer and during my studies in particle physics, I learned that a particles velocity can be affected by magnetic fields. I believe it's possible that more of the Sun's radiation is penetrating the Earth's magnetosphere ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_magnetic_fiel [wikipedia.org] d ) due to it being weaker. If more radiation hits the Earth, shouldn't that also increase the overall temperature of the Earth and can global warming be attributed to this?

No. The total energy of charged particles impacting the upper atmosphere is tiny compared with the solar light energy Compare for example, the intensity of the aurora with the intensity of sunlight. Now add in the fact that the aurora covers a tiny fraction of the earths surface while sunlight blankets half of the earth at any time.

Even if it were a significant amount of energy, this energy is entirely absorbed by the atmosphere at altitudes above 60km. You would need to come up with a plausible mechanism for transporting this radiation down into the lower atmosphere without increasing the temperature of the stratosphere.

2.) Jupitor is experiencing the same climate change that Earth is.

No, it isn't. The change on Jupiter is regional, not global. There is no indication that it is related to any solar phenomenon.

3.) Mars is experiencing the same climate change that Earth is.

No, it isn't. Mars is losing CO2 ice near its South Pole. The most likely explanation is that large dust storms from recent years dumped some dust on the ice causing it to absorb sunlight and sublime. This sublimation may cause warming by increasing the CO2 and H2O content of the Martian atmosphere. This might feedback into causing more ice to evaporate. Since there isn't an active carbonate silicate cycle on Mars due to lack of liquid water, there is nothing to prevent this from occurring. So it's likely that the Martian climate experiences warming of this type in a cyclical manner, and that the warming will continue until something else stops it. For example the reduction in the temperature difference between the poles and the equatorial regions might slow the winds enough that the dust storms stop allowing increased precipitaion of CO2 onto the poles. There is no equivalent mechanism at work on Earth.

4.) The United Nations found that there is more Methane produced from livestock, which raises global temperature greater than CO2 by a factor of approx. 20

However the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is more than 20 times longer than the residence time of methane.

[5.) What about the ice ages. We didn't cause them!]

But wait officer, there were forest fires before there were people. Therefore it couldn't have been my campfire that started it.

But wait officer, people can die without being murdered. Therefore it doesn't matter whether my fingerprints are on the gun.

[A pile of other pointless crap designed to confuse the issues deleted.]

Point 1 you could have gotten wrong just because you don't know anything about atmospheric science. The rest just puts you in the denial camp. Drop the political agenda for a while and see reality.

Interesting post, and consistent with the information I've seen on the subject.One little thing that sprung to my mind a few years ago as I was reading about the Mayan calendar and it's legendary implications mixed with Christian end-time lore is the fact that the apocalypse, if information from both sides is taken into account, should have started in late 2005. Mind you, (by my understanding of Christian theology) things won't get noticeably horrible until 3 1/2 years in, sometime around June 2009.

According to the Bible, no one can know the exact dates of Jesus' second coming, not even Jesus himself knows. There is considerable debate about whether the tribulation will be pre-rapture or post-rapture, but suffice it to say that no one, including the Mayans, can know when the end of the world will be, if Jesus himself does not know.
Of course, if Christianity is wrong, then all bets are off and maybe the Mayans do know when Jesus is coming. But then we have a Paradox.

Of course, if Christianity is wrong, then all bets are off and maybe the Mayans do know when Jesus is coming. But then we have a Paradox.

The mayans do not know of Jesus, therefore no paradox.

Possibility Matrix.0-Both are right - Mayans without knowledge of Jesus predict the end of the world. Christians predict the end of the world, which includes Jesus v2.0.1-Christians right, Mayans wrong - Lots of "I told you so"s bantered about.2-Christians wrong, Mayans right - Fewer "I told you so"s bantered about.3-Both wrong - Life goes on as normal and some people begin to realize that prophecy is inherently unreliable.

Another possibility is that people cause the end of the world themselves and spin that as their prophecy coming true.

As someone who used to work in news, I can tell you that is entirely false. After the event, there are even more stories that you can pull from an event than there were leading up to the event. For instance: Did the storm affect anything? Was it stronger than predicted? Why? Does it affect local animals at all? What about children? Was your child affected? Can we link to to increased teen suicide? Was it caused by aliens? Can we find someone that thinks it was aliens? Was the prediction wrong? Was it right? Was it both right and wrong? Are there any local experts that can weigh in on the subject?...no? Can we make some experts?

You forgot the biggie: Can we relate this to Anna Nicole? Bring that out at the right moment and the story will reach record numbers of readers and it'll be covered forever. I only wish I were kidding.

Anyone familiar with the Mayan Calendar? December 21, 2012 (13.0.0.0.0 in the Mayan Calendar) Coincidence?"

Great. It wasn't enough that the fundies were predicting apocalypse, now there's a secular apocalypse to look forward to. And here I thought we were done with Y2K. Sheeple sure loves them some end times.

Yes, when that culture, along with its religion, has been dead for centuries and all that's left are scarce or undecipherable relics such as this calendar system. Are you seriously implying that the OP practices an authentic Mayan religion? It's either that, or you're lumping superstition about nice round numbers in with religion.

Also, the term I used was 'fundie.' Though I meant it in a Christian sense as that's the dominant religion of my culture, that could mean a fundamentalist of any religion.

Actually, the problem was that they were using 36-bit integers [wikipedia.org] to represent seconds.

Now there was a subfaction amongst them who argued for abandoning the 36-bit representation, and moving to a 64-bit address bus, but the 36-bitters pointed out that that wouldn't be reverse-compatible with the existing segmented address space, so they cooked the 64-bitters and ate them with fava beans and a nice Argentinean Malbec [wikipedia.org].

Subsequently, because they hadn't invented the concept of "zero" yet, when the 36-bitters

The funny thing about your post is that, if there really is a big solar storm, one of its first consequences will be a reduction of the quality of the weather forecasts because the satelites will suffer from increased noise in their sensors and communication devices and (in case of a realy nasty solar storm) temporary electronic failures.But don't worry, odds that this activity peak would cause the end of the world as we know it is basically the same as the one of 1958 (0.0000000000000000%).

They are just about as accurate on the sun as on the earth. On the earth, every twelve months or so there are some major storms in the south atlantic. Just like on the sun every 12 years or so there are some major storms. It's the same thing, we know it will happen, we're just not clear on the details.

Yes, coincidence. I was first exposed to the-world-will-end-in-2012 when I read Graham's book Fingerprints of the Gods. I wasn't sold on his numerology.

Let me break it down for you: the Mayans had a very advanced & complex calendar that took into account a lot of different cycles and even some of the most extraordinary hiccups that come with man's attempt at keeping track of time. For the Gregorian calendar, we have leap years except we skip one every four hundred years and even with that in place I think we lose a day every 8,000 years. And you will find that every model has some special issues.

So, back to the Mayans, their measurements of days came in sets of 13, contrary to our sets of 7 days in a week. So the world is no more likely to end on 13.0.0.0.0 than it was on the new years even in year seven. Just because 13 was always the last number in their cycles just means that we start a new cycle. No cataclysmic event needed to mark it. The cycle simply repeats and they most likely go to 1.0.0.0.0 there's no such thing as overflow in their calendar.

The Gregorian calendar has leap years as follows:Every year divisible by 4 is a leap year.Except when that year is also divisible by 100, in which case it is *not* a leap year.Except when that year is also divisible by 400, in which case it *is* a leap year.

Hence 2000 was a leap year. 2100 will not be.

The fun hokeyness is due to the Western assumption that everything is linear, in spite of the fact that we repeat months, days of months, and days of weeks constantly. We don't find it odd that there are thousands of Wednesdays or March 21sts, but somehow we can't understand there ever being more than one 2007.

There was another, 4014 years ago. What I can't figure out is how prehistoric man knew when Jesus was going to be born/die/be baptised or whatever event you believe led to the changeover, and how clever it was of him to count backwards.

But before we had it right, we had to get rid of a couple weeks at the end of the middle age to resync on the sun. The Gregorian2.0 is OK, but despite its near obsolecence problem and the lack of developemnt effort, the Mayan1.0 was right long before.

Yes, well, the Maya were also known for human sacrifice. You have a lot of encouragement for getting your days and nights right when the last guy who got it wrong has his chest cut open with a stone blade and his heart removed right in front of you.

You think to yourself "Hey, I *need* my heart. I should figure out when the equinoxes are so I don't end up as the next scapegoat for a bad harvest."

Yes, well, the Maya were also known for human sacrifice. You have a lot of encouragement for getting your days and nights right when the last guy who got it wrong has his chest cut open with a stone blade and his heart removed right in front of you.

You think to yourself "Hey, I *need* my heart. I should figure out when the equinoxes are so I don't end up as the next scapegoat for a bad harvest."

I always thought was a crock. People who believe this always say "Then why does it end on 12/21/2012??? It must be significant!" My answer: "Well, the calendar's got to end somewhere. My calendar ends on 12/12/2007. OH NOES! WE GONNA DIES!"

Anyone can extend the Gregorian calendar as we know the rules on how to continue that calendar (hence why we get 2008 calendars). I'm sure, if someone really wanted to, that the Mayan calendar *could be EXTENDED* beyond 12/21/2012 as well. Doing so would be acade

It didn't say the most intense solar maximum ever. It just said in the last 50 years. So what did the Mayan calendar have to say about that event? Well we are still here, so it couldn't have been much.

Get ready for those long-distance ham radio contacts when the ionosphere goes crazy, and conditions generally improve even when it's not crazy! And now that there's no more Morse Code test, we'll see a lot of people who were stuck on VHF before on the HF bands.

Looking at auroras will be cool too. Be sure to reserve the left seat on US to Europe red-eye flights, I've seen amazing aurorae out that window, nothing that you could see from the ground.

You can bounce radio signals off the ionosphere with fairly simple equipment, if you have a ham radio license [hello-radio.org] you can do it too. The interesting thing is that not everything is known about the ionosphere. For example, an open question is whether Long-Delayed Echoes [wikipedia.org] exist or not, or whether they are just Backscatter [aa6e.net], or if they are real [wa5znu.org].

You know, now that I think about it, there wasn't a lot of VHF/UHF gear for amateur radio back then during that huge solar max. Mostly old surplus, vibrator power supply, VHF trunk-mounted FM wideband business radios recrystalled for 2M. 70cm was largely unexplored territory. Forget everything above that, unless you happened to have a military surplus klystron laying around somewhere. 1296 MHz and above was hugely experimental and the average amateur couldn't touch the gear to play around with those ban

Supposed "remote viewer" Major Ed Dames [wikipedia.org] has not-so-accurately predicted such a solar flare. He calls it the "Killshot" and says it will end most life on the planet.

And naturally he is selling the secrets of how to survive this solar flare on DVD for the low low price of $24.99. Still, it's interesting to see a psychic's claim being backed by scientific observations.

There was the Maunder Minimum [wikipedia.org], which seemed to correlate with the peak of the Little Ice Age. I don't know if anyone has come up with a convincing argument that explains how sun spots affect the Earth's climate. They can make the atmosphere expand, which contributed to the premature demise of the SkyLab space station.

Bringing up the Mayan Calendar, and the sun's various cycles, is a book called "Apocalypse 2012 [amazon.com]". (Not an affiliate link.) It's not as dire as the title might sound, though the author (Lawrence E. Joseph) does explore some of the various issues with that date. One concept he examines is that as the solar system moves around the galactic center, the earth has been shielded from various radiations it will no longer be shielded from after that date.

Anyone familiar with the Mayan Calendar? December 21, 2012 (13.0.0.0.0 in the Mayan Calendar) Coincidence?"
In Dubuque Iowa a woman severely burns her hand at the same exact moment her daughter is giving her boyfriend a hand job 8 miles away in his car.. Coincidence?

This article [nasa.gov] from NASA JPL is very informative on the subject.

The researchers found some clear links between the sun's activity and climate variations. The Nile water levels and aurora records had two somewhat regularly occurring variations in common - one with a period of about 88 years and the second with a period of about 200 years.

I think we need to take a look at the hysteria. It is turn our attention away from what we can do to better this planet. And, the idea of carbon offsets just makes people feel better for their polution levels.

Global Warming has become the new Medieval Church and anyone who does not walk a precise line on the message faces the New Inquisition.

We do need to live more green, more clean, and more simple. But, the public won't buy off on that message if we keep tying it to the Holy Church of Global Warming Hysteria. If we can show more immediate effects of living green and clean the public will follow.

We need to separate those whose real agenda is socio-economic change from the environmental argument. They aren't really interested in the environment, anyway. We need to remove the scammers, like the "carbon offset" (unregulated, uncertified, non-verifiable) companies to improve public perception.

We need to substitue Ed Beagley Jr. for Al Gore. Ed lives, breathes, talks, and walks the environment. Al Gore, while talking about it, still jets around the world, when he could use his own invention, the Internet, to show up at appearances, he maintains a house in Tennessee that uses 20 times the amount of energy as his neighbors, he is a glutton who preaches about the wonders of a diet.

We're not going to pass through the tail of a comet are we ?I mean.. solar storms I can handle, but those damn comet tails hold zombies.Self preservation would make me hide out in a tin garden shed, or the back of my big-rig,but really, the world is just doomed from that point on.

July 14, 2000 -- This morning NOAA satellites and the orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) recorded one of the most powerful solar flares of the current solar cycle. Space weather forecasters had been predicting for days that an intense flare might erupt from the large sunspot group 9077, and today one did.

The sixth in an unprecedented series of strong space storms dished out by the Sun over a 10-day period plowed past Earth Thursday, apparently cutting power to 20,000 Swedish customers. The powerful series of outbursts also claimed two satellites as casualties while fueling a host of minor disruptions to radio broadcasts and airline flight plans.

A very intense flux of electrons, evident in the magnetosphere earlier this year, may have caused a satellite failure (or at least exacerbated the situation) leading to the loss of telephone pager service to 45 million customers, research has shown. The electrons, known as highly relativistic electrons (HREs), were especially numerous in the weeks preceding the failure. Researchers say HREs have triggered spacecraft anomalies in the past when fluxes are elevated. They therefore believe this energetic electron event could have been behind the failure of the attitude control system of the Galaxy 4 spacecraft at 2200 UT on May 19, 1998. A backup system also failed, either at the same time or earlier, so operators were unable to maintain a stable Earth link.

Galaxy 4 is a heavily used communication satellite at geostationary orbit*. Its sudden failure caused not only widespread loss of pager service but also numerous other communication outages. Using a wide array of datasets, our team of scientists analyzed the space environment for the times in question and found evidence of highly disturbed solar, solar wind*, and geomagnetic conditions in late April and early May. The combination of coronal mass ejections*, solar flares*, and high speed solar wind streams led to a powerful sequence of interplanetary disturbances that hit the Earth. These disturbances produced a deep, powerful, and long-lasting enhancement of the HRE population throughout the outer Van Allen radiation zone. The kinds of disturbances witnessed are indicative of the types of events that may commonly occur during the approaching peak in solar activity in the years 2000 and 2001. It will be most important to determine how well space systems can stand up to the multifaceted effects of the space environment over the next several years.

Next time your cell phone drops acall, don't rush to blame your service provider. The culprit may well be anangry Sun.

A new study of 40 years of solardata shows that during peaks in activity, bursts of energy from the Sun canpotentially cause dropped calls for some cell phone users across wide areastwice per week. The problem is caused when radio waves associated with thebursts hit cell phone towers, creating static that overwhelms the signal at thetower, where calls are relayed.

I write code for a series of production centers (they print customized maps). The original system was developed 10 years ago and aside from a few hard drive crashes/replacements they're on the same exact SUN hardware/OS they were on 10 years ago. All the while the code base has matured and expanded greatly. Of course, I love programming in Motif... but aside from that there's not really any hurdles. I'm glad they aren't win98 or NT 4.0 boxes because that would have meant having to charge them for new ha